The Tables Have Turned: How Can the Information Systems Field Contribute to Technology and Innovation Management Research?

Introduction In the second half of the last century, modularity emerged as a powerful idea for dealing with increasingly complex systems (Schilling 2000; Simon 1962). Noting the transformative power of this perspective, Baldwin and Clark (1997) declared the arrival of the “age of modularity.” They argue that modularity was at the heart of the remarkable rate of innovation in recent history, since modularity enables firms to design and build a complex product and process from smaller subsystems and components. Although modularity is often associated with a product architecture (Ulrich 1995), it has broad implications on how firms should be organized in designing and producing complex products and processes (Sosa et al. 2004). Indeed, modularity has provided an intellectual bedrock of organizational scholarship that has produced a significant body of work in the domain of innovation and technology management (Garud et al. 2003; Schilling 2000). ! The information systems (“IS”) community has primarily played the role of a recipient of the theory of modularity. Much of IS research over the last three decades has been influenced -explicitly or implicitly -by modularity and its consequences in organizations. Modularity has provided an important context for some of the key topics that IS scholars have studied in the past. Given the pervasive digitalization that we see in society (Lyytinen and Yoo 2002), however, the logic of modularity can no longer